South likes: The Registry of Promise at Fondazione Giuliani, Roma

South likes: The Registry of Promise at Fondazione Giuliani, RomaThe Registry of Promise: The Promise of Melancholy and Ecology
Fondazione Giuliani per l’arte contemporanea, Roma, Italia
9 May – 18 July, 2014

The Promise of Melancholy and Ecology addresses issues related to ideas of future, promise, or anticipation, reassessing the modernist positivist notion of progress and acknowledging the polyvalence of such concepts in rather post-human times. Inaugurating a cycle of several exhibitions (this is the first of four “chapters”), the show curated by Chris Sharp investigates through the works of four artists our relationship with our living ecosystem, namely the melancholic response that these artists elaborate to the loss of nature, or our conception of it. During the last twenty years Jochen Lempert has worked on the representation of extinction, photographing extinct animals in natural history museums all over the world. The French artist Jean-Marie Perdrix presents a sculpture portraying the truncated part of an horse’s body casted in copper and carbon, while Peter Buggenhout’s assemblage rearranges industrial materials, giving shape to a subjective revision of the so-called natural with a quasi-organic quality. Marie Mul’s work consists of a puddle made of dark resin, mentioning elements from a bleak landscape and producing a visual discomfort that is to relate to the precariousness of our relationship with nature. Whether the notion of future can be seen from a positive or a negative perspective, the show points out existing issues that affect our notion with what we call Nature. The exhibited works contribute to represent the visual impact of psychological and philosophical reflections on the concept of nature, confirming that our relationship with the ecosystem we inhabit s part of our lives and of our intellectual concerns.